Saturday, 3 September 2011

African parliamentary support for agriculture

This is the final report of a pilot programme which investigated how parliamentary agriculture committees can be supported to help to provide better oversight on programmes looking at such things as achieving sustainable agricultural growth, food security and economic empowerment of smallholder farmers. It covered Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania.

The programme looked at ways in which agricultural committees can be assisted to develop and implement a strategic approach to support agriculture in their respective countries and constituencies.

The report acknowledges that much more work needs to be done to develop the link between MPs and government agricultural services such as the extension services at constituency level.

It also suggested that any future programme would need to put more emphasis on strengthening (or in some cases establishing) the links within a parliaments; between parliamentary committees and the executive; between different houses of parliament (two of the four countries have or will have senates as well as assemblies); and between parliamentary committees and other stakeholders such as farmers' organizations and research institutions.